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U.S. President Donald Trump (L) and Polish President Andrzej Duda attend a joint press conference in Warsaw, Poland, July 6, 2017. PAimages/Xinhua/Chen Xu. All rights reserved.

Donald Trump attended
the G20 summit in Hamburg last week where he had his first face-to-face meeting
with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Given the likely scrutiny and commotion
the event would receive, Trump needed a sure foreign policy 'win'. Hence the
short preceding stopover in Warsaw where Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS)
establishment was only too happy to cater to the US president's needs.

The visit was somewhat
unconventional. Framed as a work meeting with Poland's president Andrzej Duda,
it was supposed to have the allure of a major geopolitical event underlining
Poland's status as a US ally and project American support for the Three Seas
Initiative (TSI) summit taking place in Warsaw.

No sooner had Trump
left Warsaw for Hamburg than FOX News blasted eulogies of a
'Reaganesque performance' and Polish government-controlled media were hailing
Trump's visit as an event
of historic magnitude. In reality, the tangible outcomes of Trump's visit
are somewhat less remarkable.

A
presidential propaganda stunt

Trump's visit was meant
to carry symbolic weight. Daniel Tilles, editor of the Notes from Poland social
media news group, commented
prior to the visit that Trump and PiS "share a distain for the conventional rules
and practices of democracy" and will try to "capitalize on their
agreement on major issues like migration, defense and a distrust of
institutions such as the media and the judiciary".

Both sides did not fail
to deliver. On 6 June, on Warsaw's Krasińki Square, Trump gave his first
major public speech on foreign soil to an exalted crowd of thousands of
specially bussed-in PiS supporters. The footage from the speech was reminiscent
of Trump's campaign rallies with all the adulation his pharaonic Ego craved.

For his part, Trump
declared America's love for Poland, credited Polish-Americans for voting for
him, and heaped praise on the PiS establishment. His speech left PiS delirious.
Prime Minister Beata Szydło immediately
stated that the speech demonstrated that now "Poland was an important
country" and even a "guarantor of world peace".

There were few genuinely
critical voices in the press, but only Greenpeace, the Razem (Together)
party and other leftist groups staged small protests. Poland is a middle-sized
country in Europe, but too often its elites suffer from the inferiority complex
of a small country. The parliamentary opposition, still struggling to mount a
credible electoral challenge to PiS, dared not criticise Trump's speech seeing
it as a 'success for Poland'. PiS could not have wished for a better propaganda
coup.

Peddling
a clash of civilisations

Trump's speech, with
its stress on 'sovereignty' and 'freedom' ('democracy' was not mentioned), was
carefully tailored to reverberate PiS' own rhetoric. There was a nationalist
undertone throughout the flattery with historical references meant to appease
PiS-style patriotism - a tale of martyrdom in the face of oppression, heroic
feats, and acts of resistance all driven by an unwavering national spirit based
on traditional Catholic values.

Trump's speech seemed to downplay the Holocaust in
comparison to the calamities that Poles had suffered and to the dismay of
Poland's Jewish community he was the first US president not
to stop at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial. In this light, Trump's conjuring up
of a 'western civilisation under threat' was most disquieting. It was grist to
the mill of PiS' own anti-refugee rhetoric in defence of 'Christian'
civilisation. Even Trump's fleeting invitation to Russia to join this
'civilisational' struggle did not seem to unsettle Polish nationalist
sentiments.

'America
First' energy politics

Did the visit wield any
results beyond photo-ops and ideological support for both sides' populist
policies? Trump reneged on promises
of visa-free travel for Poles and refrained from any
explicit security guarantees. A memorandum
of intent was signed for the purchase of next-generation Patriot missiles,
but it is doubtful whether this will be a sale successfully concluded.

The key to
understanding the visit lies in the TSI summit, taking place while Trump
visited. The TSI is a reincarnation of the interwar 'Intermarium' concept - a
Polish-promoted alliance of small states in between Russia and Germany. It was
rehashed by Poland and Croatia with a pragmatic goal of more inter-regional
co-operation and improving energy infrastructure. Trump attended the summit's
inauguration ceremony and urged
the countries present to buy US Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).

The United States has
recently become a gas exporter. Entering the Polish market means competing with
Qatari LNG as well as Russian gas delivered via pipelines. The recent blockade
of Qatar – which shares its gas field with Iran – could provide opportunities
for the US in this regard.

Simultaneously, it puts the US at odds with Russia
which is eyeing building two new pipelines - Nord Stream II to Germany and
TurkStream through Turkey and the Balkans. While Germany and Turkey remain
Russia's two biggest markets, "establishing Turkey and Southeast Europe as a new transit corridor for
Russian gas remains a long shot", according
to Dimitar Bechev, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council
specialised in Balkans-Russia relations.

For this reason,
Trump's visit was mainly seen by PiS as
a snub to the EU (to show US support amid EU criticism of PiS' illiberal
policies) and Germany in particular which is hoping to be a gas hub for the
region (if the Nord Stream II pipeline gets the go-ahead). This is where the
LNG terminal in the Polish port of Świnoujście comes in.

Recently opened and
named after the late president Lech Kaczyński, it is a longstanding PiS pet
project. Through Świnoujście PiS hopes not only to become less dependent on
Russian gas, but challenge German hegemony by becoming a
regional gas hub itself. In order to realise this, Poland
needs US investment. In other words, if Trump is selling, Poland will be
buying and hoping to attract enough interest for the US to invest in its
ambitions.

Yet, Trump's backing of
PiS could lead to an increased politicisation of the TSI. Far right ideologues
like Chodakiewicz are proponents of such a course seeing
it as "culturally and ideologically compatible with American national
interests".

The
art of the deal

Following the G20
summit, Trump's meeting with Putin captured the headlines in the US, but he was
able to tweet photos of an adoring crowd in Warsaw.

Ultimately, Trump was in
Poland to sell gas. Otherwise, the immediate impact of the visit will be limited
to Poland as the big EU countries were not impressed. While surveys
show that only a minority of Poles support PiS and an even smaller number
are positively inclined towards Trump, PiS is still polling higher than the
opposition and Poles are traditionally sympathetic to America.

Trump's visit, owing to
the opposition's approval, will most likely bolster PiS' image and consolidate
its hardcore base. Nationalists are already trying to capitalise on Trump's
speech by referring to his 'civilisational' endorsement of Poland's
conservative values to
attack the LGBT movement.

Meanwhile, the government-controlled media will
keep spinning Trump's visit for political gain making it harder for the
opposition to present itself as a successful electoral alternative to PiS'
illiberal policies.

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